The Killer Inside Me is a chilling portrait of Lou Ford, the twenty-nine-year-old deputy sheriff of a small town in the oil fields of West Texas. Ford is experiencing a recurrence of "the sickness" that triggered a crime in his youth, a crime that his doctor father, now dead, covered up for him. Now Ford spends his days enforcing the law in Central City and his nights with his schoolteacher girlfriend, Amy Stanton, who also comes from a "good family." Ford's goal is to seem normal--"I've stood like that, looking nice and friendly and stupid" but something is seriously off-kilter, because "all the time I'm laughing myself sick inside" [p. 121]. The sickness that returns is worse this time, manifested in a series of sadistic murders. Jim Thompson brilliantly created a first-person voice for Lou Ford, rooting deep inside the warped psyche of this distinctive character to tell his story. Jim Thompson wrote The Killer Inside Me in 1952 for Lion Books, a publisher of paperback originals. Lion gave him a synopsis to work from, but Thompson radically changed the formula to his own, and astonished his publisher by writing the book in four weeks.